Google makes AI talent play with Kaggle buy

If you’re a company entrenched in an arms race for artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, you could do worse than tapping into a pool of thousands of data scientists to augment your digital products and services. That’s the pole position Google holds after acquiring crowdsourcing platform Kaggle last week for an undisclosed sum. Some 600,000 professional data crunchers use Kaggle to build prediction models for such heady challenges as cancer detection and heart disease diagnoses. And experts say Kaggle could help Google facilitate broader adoption of AI technologies. “Data science and machine learning is now global and this is a validation of the idea that Google recognizes that most of the smartest people in the world work for somebody else,” Neil Jacobstein, who chairs the artificial intelligence and robotics track at Singularity University, told CIO.com. “This is potentially a very positive move, I think, that could make everybody more competitive.” Kaggle’s team will be integrated with Google’s other AI assets, such as its developer library for TensorFlow, its open source machine learning software, said Fei-Fei Li, chief scientist of artificial intelligence and machine learning at Google Cloud, at the company’s Google Cloud Next event last week. Computing systems have become exponentially more powerful over the past decade, enabling companies to collect vast amounts of data. Despite advances in analytics software intended to sift through such data, companies require people who can identify and glean insights from the data and turn it into actionable information that provides a competitive advantage. Accordingly, data scientists,… [Read full story]